Just Her Luck
by gingercake
Summary: Rose is organised and ready for what will the best sixth year anyone's ever had at Hogwarts. Or so she thinks, before fate decides to intervene in the form of flooding, a promiscious younger cousin, a pregnancy scare... and Scorpius Malfoy. Too bad he's horrible and out to get her at every opportunity - but nobody seems to be noticing. Most likely, it's just her luck. (Next-gen.)


**Just Her Luck**

**Chapter One**

I had it all sorted. Everything last thing. You know, don't let anyone ever tell you can't do everything with a list (not that I think of anytime that you might be told that) because you can, especially when it comes to packing.

This was the start of my sixth year, and I had until tomorrow to arrange everything and then decide whether I was going to enter _Witch Weekly's Young, Gifted and Exemplar Witch Of The Year Competition_, which really was an unneeded, clumsy and ostentatious display of adjectives if you asked me (probably something to do with the fact Rita Skeeter was the main endorser).

Usually, I wouldn't have touched such a shallow magazine with a ten foot barge pole, but I had been in Lily's bedroom, bored to tears with her account of how _Tobias Wood had actually (!) apologised to her when he stepped on her toe... _and desperate for anything to read, had noticed one open to this page on her bed. This didn't surprise me, as despite being a gifted Quidditch player and regularly getting bruised and dirty, she had an unquenchable thirst for the sort of vapid, fangirl issues that magazines like _Witch Weekly _preached about.

Sometimes, though, Lily really did concern me with what she was willing to read in that magazine, especially once when I saw her intently gazing at a two-page spread entitled: _Potter Power: The gaze that still enthralls, even after twenty-five years, _underneath which was a large image of Uncle Harry that I'd come to recognise from a frame on our own mantelpiece: a few months after he'd just defeated Voldemort.

"Don't you think he was pretty fit when he was young?" she'd asked me earnestly.

"What?" I'd spluttered, "What sort of question is that Lily? _That's your dad!_"

"Merlin, calm down Rosie, I know that. I'm just saying," then she had shrugged her shoulders nonchalantly and gone on to read about her father's 'ruggedly chiseled brow' and 'spine-tingling green-eyed stare', while I backed away, shuddering.

Back to the present, and I had surreptitiously taken the magazine while Lily yapped on.

At home, I'd studied the competition intently. It appealed to me, not because of the chance for fame (I had enough of that already thanks) but because the main prize was a year spent traveling around the US; networking and developing a chosen skill with the top magic professionals in that field.

I'd always had high aspirations, which came from my mum, and of course having the Potter-Weasley extended family in all sorts of high-end jobs in and around magic. I knew exactly what I wanted to do with that main prize, but, was I up to taking part in all the trivial components that led to my winning of the competition?

Especially when it was sixth year, and my NEWTS were coming up - not that I was worried about them.

* * *

Dad was the worst when it came to "Anyone caught your eye yet?" or "When you bringing him home?".

Every. Single. Year.

Mum was convinced he had given me a complex, but I just shrugged it off. There was no time for that, as far as I was concerned, since I had a lot of NEWT preparation to be doing as well as planning out my future career.

(It was also why I had to keep distancing myself from fellow sixth-year Scorpius Malfoy, not that I'd been doing much getting to know him in past years).

Lily was the total opposite. Almost as bad as Roxanne, another of my female cousins. Roxanne was one year older than me, in the same year as Dominique, and the two were best friends. Both couldn't keep their eyes in their head at the amount of apparently-hot seventh year boys that traversed the school corridors. Then again, to them, anything with a pulse and a visible Adam's apple was deemed hot.

I was often told I was too uptight or judgmental. Maybe a little, but I was only trying to do my best to steer clear of unwanted school experiences. When I found someone, it had to be _perfect. _And nothing to do with that Malfoy.

Too bad that he kept subconsciously going against my wishes, even if it was in the form of sending Al letters which Al would read aloud to me every week as if they were from his muggle sailor love, on oceans far away. This was the around the time that I would tune out, and try to think of various ways to murder him, all involving heavy textbooks, or one of Hagrid's creatures chasing him deep into the Forbidden Forest...

But I digress. The one thing I didn't like about myself (apart from the easily-frizzed hair and annoying outbreaks of spots) was my unwavering interest in Malfoy. I didn't even know the boy that well, him being in Slytherin with Al and I being a Gryffindor (had to keep up the family tradition). It was annoying, but up until this summer I'd been able to lock it away in the deepest recesses of my mind.

Then he came to visit Al.

It was late July, and I was staying with Uncle Harry and Aunt Ginny when my parents were roped into taking Hugo to some Care of Magical Creatures festival up in Swansea (apparently Hagrid had recommended it). I didn't really want to go, and besides, James had a collection of barely-used textbooks that I could use to read ahead on my NEWTs classes, so it was win-win.

Malfoy was due to come for three days. He was really good friends with Al, and it also seemed like Aunt Ginny was keen to put the bad blood we had with the Malfoy family behind us. Uncle Harry was wary, but hadn't put up a fight, especially after Ginny threatened to tell Lily exactly _why _Suzette Chang had been shooting her dirty looks during her previous fourth year.

I didn't see Malfoy arriving, and kept in Lily's room most of the time when we weren't outside, looking at James' textbooks. I wasn't keen on having anything to do with him, especially after Grandpa Weasley told me all about his father and grandparents and the parts they had played in the lead up to The War. Surely no good would come from associating with someone who came from a family like that, even if at this moment he didn't seem particularly unlikeable or anything.

* * *

So, back to that time when I had my unfortunate encounter with Malfoy.

Lily had borrowed my astronomy telescope for some bizarre reason that I strongly suspected included pranking her brothers. I needed it though, so I went to the bathroom door and knocked politely, since I knew she was taking a shower.

No answer.

I tried again, a little louder and more impatiently, but nothing happened. Not to be discouraged, since she always barged in when I was in there and forgot to lock the door, I opened it and slipped inside. The garish green shower curtain covered with frog pictures (a muggle gift from Grandpa Weasley that Dad was forever trying to dispose of) was drawn tightly across, but I wasn't put off; I needed that telescope.

"Lily," I sing-songed, waving my hand in the crack that the shower curtain left, "Where in _Merlin's name have you put my-"_

It wasn't Lily that pushed their head around the curtain, and blinked at me in puzzlement with water trickling down into their eyes.

In mortification, I jumped back twelve feet and collapsed against the shower door. The definitely-not-Lily-but-definitely-a-boy in the shower stared at me.

It took me a moment to realise who it was. The long blonde hair should have given it away, but the bathroom was pretty steamy and I couldn't see much.

"Rose Weasley?!" The person yelped indignantly and in masculine tones, and I jumped.

Scorpius Bloody Malfoy?!

"_Get out, _Weasley!" Malfoy said again, his cheeks become progressively redder. From anger or embarrassment I couldn't tell, but I felt my own stubbornness kick in.

"What are you doing in the shower at this time? I thought Lily was using it!"

He grit his teeth in reply and tightened the curtain around his upper chest, leaving his face free. Now it was my turn to go red - not from Malfoy - but from inadvertently remembering my unexplainable attraction to him.

He had changed remarkably since the last I saw him, a few months back at school. His shoulders had broadened, and his face filled out to lose the unhealthy angles at which it once stook out. Since his hair was usually slicked back, it surprised me now to see it spilling forward in ashy tufts over his face, yet of course, he was in the shower, and it was wet. He was quite a prett-

Then with a jolt I realised he was actually naked, and said in a panicked huff,

"Bloody hell Malfoy, at least lock the bathroom door next time," before slowly backing out.

"Well then Rose, don't come barging in next time and then stare at me for half an hour like I'm a piece of meat," he retorted, still red and I spluttered before banging shut the door.

_"Well then Rose," _I mimicked on the way back to Lily's room, still startled at the way Malfoy sounded so much like Al. Plus I hadn't been in there for half an hour! Talk about an exaggeration, though I couldn't exactly deny the blatant staring. But anyway, why was he calling me 'Rose' when he barely knew me?

The cheek! I just knew that boy was a Malfoy through and through.

Contrary to my belief, however, Lily didn't share my mindset.

* * *

"Him being informal with you doesn't mean he's nasty or like his father," Lily said, grinning, "It just means you're acting too uptight... or probably scared of his attractiveness."

"Maybe not, but I don't know him well enough for that sort of audacity. And anyway, his father is not someone I'd want to associate with; therefore neither is Malfoy. Plus, he is not _that_ good-looking!" I ranted, trying to wrestle back my Astronomy telescope from Lily's reluctant hands.

But she just laughed, and my pulse just kept on disagreeing with my state of mind.

It still was disagreeing with me, two months later, as I packed and then picked up a photo of Al and Malfoy laughing during Quidditch practice, hanging out of one of James' old textbooks.

I groaned and threw it away. Stupid Rose Weasley and her out of control hormones.

Too bad Malfoy was such a _horrible _person. Oh well, wouldn't be seeing much of him outside classes this year, I thought lightheartedly.

I was wrong.


End file.
